XVI.

(Lecture V., page 140.)

ST. PAUL’S VIEW OF LAW.

Speaking of St. Paul’s definition of the word “law,” Reuss, in his ‘History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age,” says:—

“Primarily, this word signifies, purely and simply, the law of Moses as contained in the Pentateuch, or even a particular article of that law. “The Jews, however, had already in their common speech extended the circle of this notion, and designated by the term law the entire Old Testament, less in the literary sense—according to which the prophets were added, to complete the idea of the volume—than in the theological sense, all the other books being thus regarded as corollaries of the Mosaic legislation. It may be boldly affirmed that in most of the passages in which Paul makes use of the word law, it is in the historical or literary 236sense; the allusion is to the Old Testament as a whole, not to the Pentateuch in particular: on this account the term has most frequently that which was called in the old theology the economic signification—that is, it stands for the entire Old Testament economy.”—P. 33, 34.